Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph (136 page)

With the briefest of transitions, the music slips into D major for the B theme—lilting, liquid, meandering, like trailing your hand in water beside a drifting boat on a summer's day. Another brief transition returns to B-flat major and the A theme, the tune having picked up the liquid sixteenths of the B theme. The B theme returns, varied mainly in being now in G major and in the winds rather than the strings. At that point the variations are put aside for an interlude like a free development of the A theme. It strays into the incredible key of C-flat major, where begins an enormous, rhapsodic horn solo.
²²

The A theme returns for the last time, back in B-flat, now ornamented into lacy sextuplets with little dance figures, everything unfolding in an atmosphere of exquisite, time-suspending reverie. The peace is broken by a stern fanfare whose pealing brass recall the first movement. The reverie returns; so does the fanfare. This time, at the end of the brassy interruption the music sinks from an F-major harmony down a third to D-flat, and for a moment the music takes on an uncanny aura. That drop of a third (which happened in similar ways in the
Missa solemnis
) is a prophecy of transcendent moments in the finale. Then, far longer than the theme calls for, as if it does not want to end, the music returns to reverie, swelling in waves. It ends
forte
, then
pianissimo
.

Surely in music there had never been a more beautiful, a more profound evocation of tranquillity and Arcadian peace, spun out in music of incomparable freshness and perfection of gesture and pace. There have been only those two interruptions, with their brassy fanfares. What follows is a rending scream.

 

Richard Wagner would name the brassy burst of fury that begins the finale the “terror fanfare.” It shatters the peace of the slow movement, returns to the dissonance and despair of the first movement, and makes a new beginning with a new evocation of chaos. Now the unsettled first movement is going to find its goal, embodied in “An die Freude” (To Joy).

The threads in Beethoven's life gathered. Twenty years before, he anguished in his Heiligenstadt Testament, “Oh Providence—grant me at last but one day of
pure joy
—it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart—Oh when—Oh when, Oh divine One—shall I feel it again in the temple of nature and of mankind—Never?—No—Oh that would be too hard.” In age we often return to the ideas and inspirations of our youth. In the Ninth Beethoven returned to Schiller's poem that had been a motif of his life since his teens, to the Enlightenment ideal of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rising from liberty, happiness transforms our lives and in turn transforms society.

That vision of happiness, of joy in the temple of nature and humankind, was what in the Heiligenstadt Testament Beethoven feared he had lost forever. At the end of a lifetime of pain, did he reclaim joy in the Ninth Symphony? In his life, no. His physical and emotional miseries only got worse, and his rage raged on. But here, in his art, he found overflowing joy—if not, when all was done, a finale that satisfied him.

In the first movement of the symphony, for the last time he buried the hero and the heroic ideal once exalted in the
Eroica
. Now through Schiller he replaced that ideal with a new one: the perfected society that begins in the freedom, happiness, and moral enlightenment of each person, growing from inside outward to brothers and friends and lovers, from there in a mounting chorus outward to universal brotherhood, the world Schiller named for the ancient Classical paradise: Elysium.
²³

Schiller spoke of love as “the bond that unites all men” and an eternal law that “establishes a correlation between individual happiness and the perfection of society.”
²⁴
When he wrote “An die Freude” in the revolutionary 1780s, Schiller was not a Mason or an Illuminatus but was close to those circles, particularly in the person of his Illuminatus friend Christian Gottfried Körner. “To Joy” was written for Körner, who first published it.
²⁵
The poem encompassed the age, and the age embraced it. Of its Masonic and Illuminist echoes, the poem's journey from inside through friends and relations to a
Bund
, a confederation, and finally to a peaceful and happy world is like the agenda of the Illuminati, a secret brotherhood of the enlightened remaking society. Central to “An die Freude” is the echt-Masonic word
Brüder
, “brothers.” A Masonic encyclopedia says, “The name of brother is the most universal and highest honorary title in every mystery cult and belongs to the essence of every religious alliance.”
²⁶

In a commentary on “An die Freude,” Schiller wrote, “Let us be conscious of a higher ideal unity and by means of brotherhood we will attain to this state . . . Joy is beautiful because it provides harmony; it is ‘god-descended' because all harmony is derived from the Master of Worlds and flows back to him.”
²⁷
Here is an echo of Kant's circuit from divine to human, from the starry sky above to the moral law beneath.

Why did Beethoven proclaim joy and happiness, and not love, as the goal of human life and the path to Elysium? Perhaps because for an Aufklärer happiness is an end; freedom and love are completed in happiness. Love, in any case, had not treated Beethoven well. He was the son of a drunken father and a melancholic mother. He had extravagantly proclaimed his love to several women, to no end. He had subjected his nephew to a fierce and consuming passion that he called love, but it was something more troubled than that.

Did he have any real understanding of human love, the kind that is mutual and sharing? No one can say, but in any case as the central force in his most ambitious symphony, instead of Love he chose Joy—like Truth and Beauty, one of the personified qualities beloved of Aufklärers. All along, the only real fulfillment of Beethoven's life had been the joy of understanding his gift, of losing himself and his pain in the
raptus
of making music. In that dimension, the Ninth is a hymn not just to redeeming joy but to the redemption music itself can provide.

Schiller again: “All nations that have a history have a paradise, an age of innocence, a golden age . . . A state such as this is not merely met with before the dawn of civilization, it is also the state to which civilization aspires . . . The idea of a similar state, and the belief in the possible reality of this state is the only thing that can reconcile man with all the evils to which he is exposed in the path of civilization.” In
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry
, Schiller wrote that humanity can no longer recover Arcadia, the primeval paradise in nature. In the modern world, the artist must lead humanity, “who no longer can return to Arcadia, forward to Elysium.”
²⁸

Whether or not Beethoven knew these particular words of Schiller, they were ideas inherent in the poet's work and in the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist, and therefore part of what formed Beethoven. Perhaps here is the point of the slow movement of the Ninth: an evocation of lost Arcadian peace. The terror fanfare of the finale shatters that peace, because Arcadia is an illusion, a dream no longer possible in this world. The finale's opening blast marks the intrusion of reality, and a new beginning.

By now Beethoven had lived through the French Revolution and a relentless counterrevolution in the repressions of the last decade. Now in the finale of the Ninth Symphony, he mounted his counter-counterrevolution, to keep the hope of freedom alive.

 

He begins the finale with his terror fanfare in brass and winds and timpani, on a screaming chord: D minor with an added B-flat on the top, violently joining his two principal keys. It begins on an upbeat, doing violence to the meter, like a grotesque echo of the exalted upbeat that begins the
Missa solemnis
. The chaotic sound and effect are new in his work, new in music. But he had used that harmony before. In a different key, it is the same piercing chord that marks the climax of the
Eroica
development (in that case, A minor with F on top). There it was a representation of a catastrophe, say, a crux in a battle, out of which the hero sailed in a new theme. Here it is a return to the tumult and despair of the first movement.
²⁹

At the same time, the terror fanfare is another curtain-raiser. The movement proper begins with an idea incomprehensible to both listeners and orchestral players of the time: the double basses of the string section play a drifting, tonally wandering line recalling an operatic recitative. Beethoven had put recitative effects in instrumental works before, one of them the
Tempest
Sonata. But they had never been done in the orchestra. For years, players had no idea how to perform these passages.

The fanfare breaks out again, the basses answer again. At that point Beethoven, in the context of his time, plays one of his strangest cards yet. As if in a mangling of time we hear for a few seconds the mysterious A–E tremolos that began the symphony. The basses respond to this phantom with more wordless, chromatic recitative that seems to say,
No, not that
. Now there is a snippet of the scherzo and then of the slow movement, the scherzo rebuffed gruffly by the basses, the slow movement with wistful regret, growing to a
fortissimo
outburst.
³⁰
That in turn gives rise to another snippet: it is the first phrase of the
Freude
theme in the winds, marked
dolce
, “sweetly.” Now in a clear D major the basses wordlessly but unmistakably cry,
Yes! This is what we want!
In short, evocations of the first three movements have appeared in the finale, the basses have turned them away, and then they embrace the
Freude
theme.

In fact, Beethoven first roughed out those bass recitatives with words for a singer. In one sketch, after the quotation of the first movement the text of the recitative is “No, this would remind us too much of our despair.” After the second movement snippet, “Nor this either, it is only sport, something more beautiful and better.” After the third movement quotation, “Nor this, it is too tender, we must seek for something more animated.” And after the bit of
Freude
theme, “This is it, Ha!, now it is found, I myself will intone it.”
³¹
All these phrases evoke the setting of a
geselliges Lied
, one of the company searching for the best song for the occasion. But Beethoven was right to leave out words in the opening recitatives. After the initial shock of the time-warp return of the opening movements, the sentiments are entirely clear in the recitative of the double basses.

What has been sought since the first movement has been found. After their dismissing and then accepting recitatives, the basses quietly play through the
Freude
theme, unaccompanied—in the way that, say, a composer would write out the completed melody while rehearsing it in his head. Here again is the metaphor of creation, and of self-creation. In musical terms, two intersecting trains of thought have been set up. One is that the
Freude
theme is going to be the matter of the finale; everything will turn around it. Since it is based on a single theme rather than any ordinary finale pattern such as a rondo, the form is going to serve the theme rather than, as usual in music of the Classical period, the themes serving the form.

The second train of thought is that the form is going to be inflected as much by literary and symbolic forces as by “purely musical” ones. If it is true that Beethoven usually thought of the technical, the logical, the expressive, and the dramatic all at once and equally (except when he did not), here is one work where he places drama in equal possession of the musical dialogue—as he placed words in the forefront of the
Missa solemnis
. In the finale there is no “abstract” musical reason for the snippets of earlier movements.
³²
Beethoven peremptorily placed them there to make a dramatic point. In musical terms, the movement so far is episodic, the unfolding imposed from without rather than generated from within. That will be true of much of the finale.
³³

 

After the ingenuous little
Freude
theme is rehearsed alone in the basses, as if teaching it to the orchestra, it is repeated, acquiring lovely contrapuntal accompaniments. On its fourth iteration/variation it becomes a grand military march. The march climaxes, the music sinks down to quiet fragments. At that point the terror fanfare bursts out again, more fiercely than before: now the first chord has every note of the D-minor scale smashed together. During it, the bass soloist rises.

If much of the matter is effectively as literary as it is musical, Beethoven has not forgotten musical logic. The orchestral bass recitative of the beginning implied words, to prepare us for the actual words to come. That was one solution to the problem of how to introduce the poem in some kind of organic way. Now instead of launching directly into the Schiller, the rest of the solution was to have the song introduced by a real recitative by a real singer.

The words Beethoven himself wrote for this recitative place the music in the context of a companionable gathering, the beginning of a
geselliges
Lied
. As if with glass raised to us, the bass proclaims, “O friends, not these tones! Rather let's strike up something more pleasing, and full of joy.” “Joy!” he cries again, and his brothers—the men in the choir—answer, “Joy! Joy!” Their leader peals out the tune as if firing them up and teaching it to them. All glasses raised now, the men join in lustily on the last lines (the altos doing service on the top part):

 

Joy, thou lovely god-engendered

Daughter of Elysium,

Drunk with fire we enter,